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2011年1月31日 星期一

In May 2010, Barack Obama invited a small group of presidential historians to the White House for a working supper in the Family Dining Room. It was the second time he'd had the group in since taking office, and as he sat down across the table from his wife Michelle, the President pressed his guests for lessons from his predecessors. But as the conversation progressed, it became clear to several in the room that Obama seemed less interested in talking about Lincoln's team of rivals or Kennedy's Camelot than the accomplishments of an amiable conservative named Ronald Reagan, who had sparked a revolution three decades earlier when he arrived in the Oval Office. Obama and Reagan share a number of gifts but virtually no priorities. And yet Obama was clearly impressed by the way Reagan had transformed Americans' attitude about government. The 44th President regarded the 40th, said one participant, as a vital "point of reference." Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan's diaries and attended the May dinner, left with a clear impression that Obama had found a role model. "There are policies, and there is persona, and a lot can be told by persona," he says. "Obama is approaching the job in a Reaganesque fashion."

When Obama stood before Congress, the Cabinet and the American people to deliver his second State of the Union address, both the Reagan persona and policies put in appearances. He proposed a freeze in discretionary spending and federal salaries, a push to simplify the tax code and billions in cuts to the defense budget, and he made new calls for a bipartisan effort to repair Social Security. Each of these had been proposed before by another third-year President coming off a midterm defeat in a period of high unemployment. "Let us, in these next two years — men and women of both parties, every political shade — concentrate on the long-range, bipartisan responsibilities of government," Reagan said in his 1983 State of the Union, "not the short-range or short-term temptations of partisan politics." (See Reagan in TIME's list of the top 10 memorable debate moments.)

At a glance, it's hard to imagine a President who had less in common with Reagan than the Ivy League lawyer from Hawaii who seeks larger federal investments, a bigger social safety net and new regulations for Wall Street and Big Oil. But under the surface, there is no mistaking Obama's increasing reliance on his predecessor's career as a helpful template for his own. Since the November elections, Obama has brought corporate executives into the White House, reached out to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and made compromise his new watchword. He signed a surprise $858 billion tax cut that would have made Reagan weep with joy and huddled with Reagan's former White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein for lessons learned when the Gipper governed amid economic troubles. Over the Christmas break, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs tweeted that Obama was reading a Reagan biography, and just to confirm the bond, Obama recently wrote an homage to Reagan for USA Today. "Reagan recognized the American people's hunger for accountability and change," Obama wrote, conferring on Reagan two of his most cherished political slogans. (See "From Actor to Politician: 1966, Ronald Reagan's Pivotal Year.")

Every man who occupies the Oval Office discovers that the place is haunted — by both the achievements and the failures of his predecessors. It is only natural for them to ask, How will I stack up? Where will history rank me? And do I really belong here with the likes of Washington, Jefferson and all the rest? LBJ worried constantly about Eisenhower's opinion. Reagan often modeled himself in style on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whom he cast his first vote for President, in 1932. George H.W. Bush asked himself, Can I be another Teddy Roosevelt? When George W. Bush was asked after his first term whether he thought more or less highly of any of his predecessors, he replied that having sat in the chair himself, he thought more highly of all of them.

Obama's affection for Reagan's political style carries with it a clear self-interest. White House aides gaze fondly at the arc of the Reagan presidency in part because they pray Obama's will mirror it. Both men entered office in wave elections in which the political center made a historic shift. Both faced deep economic downturns with spiking unemployment in their first term. Both relied heavily on the power of oratory. "Our hope," admits Gibbs, "is the story ends the same way." (See "The Reagan Revelation.")

What Reagan Taught ObamaIn many ways, the Gipper gave Obama his start. Obama's first public political act occurred on Feb. 18, 1981, just 29 days after Reagan took the oath of office in Washington. The 19-year-old sophomore, who had just abandoned the nickname Barry for his birth name Barack, climbed onto an outdoor stage at Occidental College to urge his school to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. "There's a struggle going on," he called out. "I say, there's a struggle going on." As he spoke, Reagan was already laying the groundwork to shift U.S. policy on South Africa in the opposite direction, giving cover to the all-white government under a policy called constructive engagement. (Comment on this story.)

In the years that followed, Reagan would come to epitomize all that Obama opposed. Reagan cut social spending in America's cities, backed what Obama called "death squads" in El Salvador and began to build what Obama regarded as an "ill conceived" missile-defense shield. "I personally came of age during the Reagan presidency," Obama wrote later, recalling the classroom debates in his courses on international affairs. When he graduated from Columbia in 1983, Obama decided to become a community organizer. "I'd pronounce the need for change," Obama wrote in his memoir. "Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds." A decade later, he was still at it, leading a 1992 Illinois voter-registration effort aimed at breaking the Reagan coalition's hold on his state's electoral votes.

But in Obama's story line, Reagan has been more than just the antagonist. As the 1980s rolled on and Obama matured, Reagan became a model for leadership. The attraction was less substantive than stylistic and instinctive. Both had strong mothers and dysfunctional fathers. Both prided themselves on bringing people together. Obama even conceded that he sometimes felt the emotional pull of Reagan's vision. "I understood his appeal," Obama recalled in his second book, The Audacity of Hope. "Reagan spoke to America's longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies." The Great Communicator, it seems, had struck a chord.

This admiration stayed with Obama after he rose to the U.S. Senate and as he weighed a run at the White House. In late 2006, his top strategist, David Axelrod, laid out an Obama-as-Reagan theory of the race. "I remember talking about the fact that this had the potential to be one of those big-change elections like 1980," Axelrod says now. "The Republican project seemed to have run out of gas." Axelrod believed the political pendulum, which had swung left with the New Deal and had been reversed by Reagan, was once again reaching the end of its arc. (See Patti Davis on her father Ronald Reagan's best qualities.)

Among Obama loyalists, the Reagan theory was received wisdom, and for political reasons it was closely held. In January 2008, Obama broke cover. "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," Obama told a newspaper editorial board in Nevada. "He tapped into what people were already feeling, which is, We want clarity, we want optimism." Obama's comments inflamed the Democratic left (not to mention the Clinton operation), but his aides thought little of it at the time. "I basically told headquarters, 'Sorry I didn't call this in,'" remembers Gibbs, who was traveling with Obama at the time. "I had just heard him say this so many times."

In the 2008 general election, Obama's aides saw their challenge as the same one Reagan faced against Jimmy Carter: a need to demonstrate authority and credibility to the American people, many of whom thought Reagan might not be suitable as Commander in Chief. While Reagan solidified his support in a televised debate with Carter, Obama did it by outmaneuvering John McCain with his far steadier handling of the financial collapse. Obama's campaign team even sought for a time to stage an event at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, where Reagan made history.

Theory into PracticeShortly after the election, reporters Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson asked Obama if he thought his victory marked the end of the Reagan era. "What Reagan ushered in was a skepticism toward government solutions to every problem," Obama said. "I don't think that has changed." But then he went on to say he believed his election would spell "an end to the knee-jerk reaction toward the New Deal and Big Government." In Obama's mind, his election was not an endorsement of the outsize government role that Reagan battled — bureaucratic, ever expanding, self-interested — but a cry for government that could carry out its basic missions more effectively. "I think what you're seeing is a correction to the correction," Obama explained. (See Reagan in TIME's list of the top 10 political defections.)

That's not the sort of slogan that fits easily on a bumper sticker. One reason was that, unlike Reagan's, Obama's central theme remains somewhat mysterious. No one was unclear about Reagan's guiding philosophy: "Government is the problem," he declared on his Inauguration Day, and by then he had been saying it for nearly 20 years. Obama's is more complex. He wants to reset the public's attitude toward government, reverse 30 years of skepticism and mistrust and usher in a new era in which government solutions are again seen as part of the answer to the nation's ills. But the yearlong health care debate only reminded Americans of government's tendency to slow things down, muddle the choices and perhaps make them more expensive. A September Gallup poll found that 7 in 10 Americans had a negative impression of the federal government; they used words like too big, confused and corrupt to describe it. Obama's signature initiative, a vast expansion of the federal role in health care, has mostly polled under 50% since mid-2009.

Yet even the midterm wipeout has become part of the borrowed Reagan script. For months, aides like Axelrod warned Obama to expect a drop in the polls like the one Reagan suffered during the 1982 recession. Reagan "wasn't the Great Communicator then," notes one senior Obama aide. Just as Reagan's revolutionary agenda coincided with a historic recession, massive unemployment and a humbling defeat in the 1982 midterms, the story went, Obama's new spending programs coincided with a historic recession, deep unemployment and midterms that cost the Democrats control of Congress. As the 2010 elections approached, White House aides struggled to recast press expectations in the mold of Reagan's early struggles. "The most analogous election to the midterms probably isn't the environment Clinton faced in 1994," argued communications director Dan Pfeiffer. "It's the one Reagan faced in 1982."

This is where the Obama-Reagan comparison begins to break down. Lou Cannon, who wrote the Reagan biography that Obama read on vacation, points out that economic growth in the U.S. in the four quarters following the 1982 elections averaged a steroidal 7%. Most economists expect the U.S. economy to grow no more than half as fast this year. "If you were to say to anyone now that the U.S. would have a 7% growth rate in 2011, they would be writing the second Inaugural speech already," says Cannon.

Duberstein, Reagan's chief of staff, believes that Obama and Reagan share some traits: both loners more than backslappers, both heavily reliant on their spouses, both more trusting of their instincts than their advisers. But the 44th President has some ways to go before matching the 40th in the communications department. "Obama for the first two years has tried to forge a consensus in Washington," Duberstein says. "He needs to take a page from Reagan and forge a consensus in America. Let his aides worry about the back and forth in D.C. He needs to be communicating with the American people." (See TIME's 2004 Appreciation on Reagan.)

When Obama's Jan. 25 speech soared highest, it streaked far above Washington's often pointless political skirmishes and spoke directly to the nation's pride. "As contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be," the President said, "I know there isn't a person here who would trade places with any other nation on earth."

Right guard: Reagan fashioned a revolution that was positive and optimistic and found approval among both Republicans and Democrats

New centrist: Chastened by voters in November, Obama is leading his team back toward the middle

Blessed by Weakened RivalsHistorians have noticed that Obama's current situation shares one other similarity with the dark days of the Reagan era: the eroding unity of their opponents. Democrats were splitting in two in the early 1980s, into a labor-backed left and a new group of moderates who wanted to move the party to the center. Today, Obama faces a Republican Party that is struggling to reconcile its traditional, business-friendly wing and the upstart, impatient Tea Party faction. The split is starting to be distracting for the GOP. After Obama's speech, Republicans came back with two responses — one from the party's leadership and one from a junior Congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, under the Tea Party banner. Bachmann said she did not intend "to compete with the official Republican remarks," but that was exactly the effect. "It was problematic and confusing for the Republican Party," says Mark McKinnon, a former strategist for John McCain. When reporters asked McCain about the Bachmann rebuttal, he said with a wink, "It's a free country."

Reagan's fiercest defenders naturally are suspicious about Obama's bromance with Reagan. "He's been trying to unspool everything Reagan stood for," says one old hand. Nor is the Reagan role model something the President can really boast about to his nervous allies on the left. Obama will not take part in the 100th birthday celebration for Reagan at Simi Valley, Calif., in early March, though he may have something to contribute when a black-tie gala is held in Washington later this spring. (See TIME's photo-essay "Ronald Reagan's Fulcrum Year: 1966.")

Obama invited Nancy Reagan to the White House 19 months ago, when he signed legislation creating a commission to plan for her husband's centennial. The meeting was cordial and generous on both sides. Nancy and Michelle Obama had lunch. Nancy, who in her ninth decade retains a healthy sense of humor, didn't miss a chance to point out one difference between Obama and her late husband. "You're a lefty," she said as Obama inked the Reagan commission into law.

"I am a lefty," Obama replied. A lefty who wants to be remembered just like Ronnie.

2011年1月30日 星期日

So who’s top of the class now?

A few weeks ago, I visited New York’s Columbia University to take part in a debate about the global economy. Since the evening was chaired by Hugh Patrick, a professor of Japanese studies, I was not surprised to see some Japanese faces there.

What was striking, though, was the behaviour of the Chinese students in the audience. When the speeches were over a clutch of them introduced themselves very articulately, and continued the debate in impressively fluent English. The Japanese students, by contrast, hovered silently on the margins, half-unseen.

Perhaps that was a coincidence. Or maybe not. This week, following the visit by Chinese president Hu Jintao to Washington, the US has been convulsed by debate about the changing role of China on the world stage. But away from those visible, macro-economic changes in east Asia, a rather fascinating little power shift has been quietly developing in the grassroots of some American business schools and universities.

The issue revolves around the behaviour of Chinese and Japanese students. A couple of decades ago, when Japan was riding high in the global economy, Japanese companies and institutions were keen to send their brightest students to study in US (or British) universities, to teach them western technology and skills.

Once those students arrived, they were often a rather polite, quiet bunch; typically they kept their heads down while working phenomenally hard. But nobody at the universities dared ignore them: Japan was associated with money and power. (Just read Michael Lewis’s book Liar’s Poker for an entertaining description of how this played out in the Salomon Brothers 1980s training programme.) And Japanese students were usually enthusiastic about the opportunity; going to Harvard or Columbia was considered useful for their career.

But in the past five years the number of Japanese students at six of the most elite American universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, has tumbled by 36 per cent to 477, according to the Nikkei newspaper. Last year alone, Japanese enrolments at all US institutions fell by 15 per cent to 24,000, according to the Institute of International Education. That pushed Japan into sixth place in the foreign students’ league table, below Taiwan and South Korea.

但据报纸《日本经济新闻》(Nikkei)称，过去5年里，在哈佛和斯坦福 (Stanford)等6所美国最杰出的大学中，日本留学生人数骤减了36%，仅剩477人。根据美国国际教育协会(Institute of International Education)的数据，仅去年一年，美国所有机构招收的日本留学生总数就减少了15%，至2.4万人。这使得日本滑落至外籍留学生人数排行榜的第6 位，位居台湾和韩国之后。

Kathy Matsui, a Harvard alumna who is now one of the most senior economists in Japan, confirms: “The number of Japanese students studying abroad has plummeted. If you look at what Chinese or Korean students are doing, there is a real contrast. It is worrying, because Japan needs more people who are global and international.”

Why is this happening? One factor is Japan’s stagnant economy. “Japanese corporations don’t have the money to send people over here in the numbers they used to, nor does the government,” observes Alicia Ogawa, adjunct associate professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. But the problem goes beyond finance: even when Japanese students can find the money to come, their English is often too poor – and they often fail to properly engage. “In Japan there now seems to be a ‘What’s the point?’ attitude,” Ogawa suggests. “Even when Japanese are let in, they often won’t engage in the class debate – they keep to themselves.”

为何会出现这种情况？一个原因就是日本经济的停滞。“日本企业的财力不足以像以前那样 把那么多的人送到这儿来，政府也没钱，”哥伦比亚大学国际关系与公共事务学院(School of International and Public Affairs)兼职副教授艾丽西亚•小川(Alicia Ogawa)说道。但问题不仅出在资金上：即便日本学生找得到资助，他们的英语也往往太糟糕了——往往没办法与美国人展开正常沟通。“在日本，现在似乎出 现了一种‘这有什么意义？’的观点，”小川表示。“即使是日本学生被录取后，他们往往也不愿参与课堂辩论——表现得很自闭。”

. . .

……

The trend in China could hardly be more different. Last year, the number of Chinese students at US institutions rose by 30 per cent to 128,000, pushing China for the first time into the top slot. And the Chinese who are now arriving at Columbia, Harvard – or anywhere else – not only tend to speak good (self-taught) English, but they are becoming increasingly assertive too. “The Chinese are really engaging in the class,” says one Harvard academic. “So are the Koreans.”

Perhaps this is inevitable: China, after all, is a vast, rapidly growing country, while Japan is a mature economy. Young Chinese consequently seem convinced that there is plenty to learn – and copy – in America. Many young Japanese, however, feel that learning foreign skills, ideas or technology is more effort than it is worth; a new sense of isolationism is taking hold.

To me, this seems to be a tragedy for Japan; particularly since it reflects and fuels subtle cultural perceptions inside the US too. Twenty years ago, Japan was perceived in America as a powerful presence on the world stage; these days, the country has slipped into the margins of public consciousness and debate.

China, by contrast, is visible and centre-stage – partly because America cannot decide whether it poses an opportunity or threat. Perhaps the presence of those Chinese students at US universities will be a force for good; after all, it should promote more engagement and global growth. Or perhaps this trend will simply enable Chinese students to beat Americans at their own game, and thus ultimately create more tension. Either way, the one thing that is clear is that nobody can afford to ignore the Chinese; the country, like its students in that Columbia hall, has presence – and an air of purpose.

The only question that really hangs in the air, at Columbia and other campuses, is whether this pattern will still be in place in 20 years time. Will those Chinese students still be flocking to the US? Or will they have decamped to Shanghai, or been replaced again by another group of “newcomers”? Any predictions or ideas would be gratefully received; particularly if they emanate from China – or Japan.

2011年1月29日 星期六

'A.I.G. Shouldn't Exist':Some critics of the government's rescue have expressed that view. What's unusual is that a former chairman of the company is saying it. Harvey Golub told Bloomberg Television that there is no strategic fit between American International Group's two main businesses, and as a result, "longer-term, A.I.G. shouldn't exist."

Taiwan reduced the feed-in tariffs for solar power for 2011 contracts by about 30 percent from last year’s level because of the falling cost of installing equipment that converts sunlight into energy.

State-run Taiwan Power Co. will pay NT$7.33 (25 cents) a kilowatt-hour for power generated from ground solar panels, compared with NT$11.12 for 2010, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement today. The 2011 price for roof-top solar power is as high as NT$10.32.

“Solar power costs may fall further,” Hwang Jung-chiou, vice minister of economic affairs, said in a press conference in Taipei today.

The new floor price is NT$2.61 for electricity generated by wind, the ministry said. The government aims to have 100 megawatts of onshore wind power capacity and 70 megawatts of photovoltaic panels installed this year, it said.

Prices Paid

Feed-in tariffs, or the prices paid to generators by Taiwan Power, the island’s monopoly grid operator, are at least NT$11.12 per kilowatt-hour for photovoltaic solar panels installed in 2010 and NT$2.38 for wind farms, the Bureau of Energy said in a statement on its website in December 2009. That compared with an average cost of NT$2.06 per kilowatt-hour for fossil fuels such as coal and oil.

Taiwan’s government set feed-in tariffs for electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines at higher levels than for those for power from fossil fuels to spur production of renewable energy. President Ma Ying-jeou, who took office in May 2008, has pledged to cut emissions to 2000 levels by 2025. Lawmakers approved the island’s Renewable Energy Development Act in 2009.

Some historians say the first car race took place in France in 1887, just a year after Carl's Benz's automobile was patented. But only one car drove in that event, so it's probably fairer to say the first real competition was the Paris-to-Rouen race of 1894. Since then, motor racing has evolved into a multi-billion euro sport. It's also crucial to carmakers' marketing and development units.

European Business Week | 28.01.2011 | 16:30

Cooperation and competition in the auto industry

The car industry is a sprawling web of interlocking partnerships. But not all strategic alliances succeed. Back in the 1970s, Volkswagen and Porsche built a car together. It sold fairly well in the US, but German consumers rejected the "Volkswagen Porsche" as a mongrel. It's a lesson today's executives should remember as they negotiate alliances to access new markets and share development costs.

2011年1月25日 星期二

Lex专栏:李宁和耐克差在哪？

Li Ning

“China’s Nike”? Not exactly. If Li Ning continues on its current trajectory, the similarities will start and end with the swoosh-alike logo.

“中国的耐克(Nike)”？不尽然。如果李宁(Li Ning)因循当前的发展轨迹，它与耐克的相似点就将止于那个与耐克相似的商标。

Named after its gymnast founder, the Beijing-based sports manufacturer/retailer increased revenues by nine times, and earnings-per-share by ten, between 2002 and 2009. By January last year, though, as Li Ning opened its first US store in Portland, Oregon – Nike’s backyard – the flaws in the routine were becoming obvious.

Li Ning had built the biggest sports brand sales network in China, with 7,748 outlets. Just 474 were managed directly, though; 60 per cent of the remainder were run by about 2000 inexperienced retailers who were reluctant to cut prices to shift old inventory, leaving little room for new, higher-priced products. In June, confronting persistently weak order books, Li Ning gave itself a slightly different logo and a new slogan, “Make the change”.

Investors did just that, selling not just Li Ning (down 42 per cent since then) but rival manufacturer/retailers with similar distribution problems like Anta, Xtep and 361 Degrees. The only Chinese sportswear stock in positive territory over that period is pure retailer Pou Sheng (+37 per cent), a big outlet for Nike, Adidas, Reebok and Puma.

Handing favoured franchisees another few percentage points of wholesale discounts could protect Li Ning’s market share while it rationalises domestic distribution over the next two years. But Nike will also be spending heavily in what is easily its most profitable territory. Meanwhile, Credit Suisse data on Chinese sportswear consumption shows the scale of Li Ning’s challenge. Preferences switch from domestic brands to foreign as monthly household income exceeds Rmb7000 ($1000). In sneakers and vests, as in bigger-ticket items, China’s would-be global champions seem a long way from conquering their own turf, let alone anyone else’s.

William C. Westmoreland Is Dead at 91; General Led U.S. Troops in Vietnam

By CRAIG R. WHITNEY and ERIC PACE

Published: July 20, 2005

Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the Army artilleryman and paratrooper who failed to lead United States forces to victory in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and then made himself the most prominent advocate for recognition of their sacrifices, spending the rest of his life paying tribute to his soldiers, died Monday night in a retirement home in Charleston, S.C., his son, James Ripley Westmoreland, announced.

Westy, as he became known while a West Point cadet, led fast-moving artillery battalions in World War II and became a paratrooper as the Army prepared in the 1950's for the new kind of war he would face in Vietnam.

There, he presided over a vast buildup from 16,000 troops when he arrived to more than 500,000 in 1968, when a devastating Communist offensive caused President Lyndon B. Johnson to lose confidence in the strategy and replace the general.

Though he was dogged by antiwar protestors and denounced as a war criminal when, as Army chief of staff from 1968 to 1972, he tried to speak on college campuses, after passions cooled General Westmoreland led a march of Vietnam veterans to their memorial in Washington in 1982 and, tearfully, a gathering of 200,000 veterans in Chicago in June 1986.

He never understood the war as a Vietnamese nationalist struggle against French and later American domination. Ho Chi Minh and his Communist successors believed they could out-suffer and outlast those they saw as foreign invaders supporting a "puppet" South Vietnamese regime; General Westmoreland believed that hundreds of thousands of American troops could root out the Communist insurgents and enable freedom and democracy to grow in Vietnam, but that Washington lost its nerve, and lost the war.

"Had President Johnson changed our strategy and taken advantage of the enemy's weakness to enable me to carry out the operations we had prepared over the preceding two years in Laos and Cambodia and north of the demilitarized zone, along with intensified bombing and the mining of Haiphong harbor, the North Vietnamese doubtlessly would have broken," he wrote in his memoirs.

Instead, as he saw it, "The United States in the end abandoned South Vietnam."

President Richard M. Nixon did not take decisive steps to win, and after most United States troops withdrew in 1973 after a cease-fire, Communist tanks rolled into Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975. "Despite the final failure of the South Vietnamese, the record of the American military services of never having lost a war is still intact," General Westmoreland wrote.

His firm jaw, bushy eyebrows and ramrod military bearing made the six-foot-tall William Childs Westmoreland the very image of a general, though he said he learned from an early encounter with a soft-spoken major named Omar Bradley that there was more than one way to command.

In later years, he often spoke to veterans' groups, his son said, getting to all 50 states. "That became, in effect, his raison d'être," Mr. Westmoreland said in a comment quoted by The Associated Press. "He did have a point of view on Vietnam, but he did not speak about that. He was not trying to justify anything."

A Bright Early Career

General Westmoreland's rise to command in Saigon came after an early career that caught the eye of senior officers who later became influential during the Kennedy administration, notably Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, who was commanding the 82nd Airborne Division in Sicily when they first met in 1943 and later influenced President John F. Kennedy's thinking on counterinsurgency warfare.

The general was born on March 26, 1914, near Spartanburg, S.C., where his father was a cotton-mill manager who later became an investment banker. His paternal ancestors included soldiers who had served during the Revolutionary War and with the Confederate Army, but after graduating from high school in Pacolet, he went to The Citadel, the state military college, in 1931. His father wanted him to study law after graduation, General Westmoreland wrote in his memoir, "A Soldier Reports" (Doubleday, 1976).

But instead, James F. Byrnes, an influential family friend, secured for him an appointment to West Point, which he entered in 1932. Explaining to an uncle who had been with Lee at Appomattox that he was "going to that same school that Grant and Sherman went to," he felt better after his uncle replied, "That's all right, son, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson went there, too."

He graduated with the class of 1936 and at Fort Sill, Okla.; Schofield Barracks in Hawaii; and Fort Bragg, N.C., led a leisurely life of the field artillery officer: formal dinners and dances, horse shows and polo (at a time when artillery pieces were still horse drawn).

At Fort Sill, he first met the daughter of the post executive officer, Katherine ("Kitsy") Van Deusen, 9 years old at the time. They were married in 1947 and had three children: a daughter, Katherine Stevens Westmoreland; a son, James Ripley Westmoreland II; and another daughter, Margaret Childs Westmoreland. General Westmoreland's wife and children survive him.

He went to North Africa in 1942 as a lieutenant colonel in command of the 34th Field Artillery Battalion, part of the Ninth Division, which went to Sicily and later landed in Normandy, but not in the first wave on June 6, 1944. He was the division's chief of staff when the division entered Germany and was decorated for his actions in a battle at the Rhine crossing at Remagen, but suffered no injuries. "Somehow none of the enemy's shells had my number," he wrote.

Returning to Fort Bragg after the war, he commanded a parachute infantry regiment for a year and then, under another commander influential in his later career, Maj. Gen. James M. Gavin, became chief of staff of the 82d Airborne Division, remaining there for three years.

General Westmoreland went to Korea in 1952 as commander of the 187th Regimental Combat Team and later clashed with a division commander who ordered him to withdraw one of his battalions from a hill where it was engaged with Chinese Communist forces. The general complied only under protest.

Transferred to the Pentagon in late 1953, he ran the Army's manpower office, a perch from which he observed the Eisenhower administration's struggle with a decision whether to rescue stranded French paratroopers in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu with troops or even nuclear weapons.

The French were left to their defeat, and Vietnam was split in two in 1954, with Ho Chi Minh's Communists in charge of an independent state north of the demilitarized zone at the 17th parallel and their adversaries struggling to reorganize south of it, with American help.

"The difference in the later American commitment was that the stigma of French colonialism was removed," General Westmoreland wrote later, though the North Vietnamese Communists and their followers would not agree.

General Taylor made him secretary of the Army General Staff in 1955, and three years later, he took command of the 101st Airborne Division in Fort Campbell, Ky., moving to West Point as superintendent in 1960. As vice president, Johnson went there in 1961 to deliver the commencement address, telling the cadets he was confident that their class would "nail the coonskins to the wall." The following year, Gen. Douglas MacArthur told them, "Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable - it is to win our wars."

That was General Westmoreland's mission when he was chosen by the Johnson administration a few months after President Kennedy's assassination to go to Vietnam as deputy to the United States military commander there, Gen. Paul Harkins, and replace him in June 1964 as a full four-star general.

"Replacing General Harkins with Westy," Robert S. McNamara, then secretary of defense, wrote in his book "In Retrospect" (Times Books/Random House, 1995), helped to signal President Johnson's "determination to increase the effectiveness of U.S. policy and operations in Indochina."

As head of the United States Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, General Westmoreland decided that far more American combat involvement was necessary to enable the struggling South Vietnamese military to resist the more disciplined and organized Communists.

At the beginning of 1964, there were only 16,000 American military advisers in South Vietnam. Political instability in Saigon, the general wrote in his memoirs, made escalation vital.

'A Pandora's Box'

The overthrow and killing of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in a coup by officers in November 1963, the general wrote, had "opened a Pandora's box of political turmoil seriously deterring effective prosecution of the war and leading directly to the necessity of introducing American troops" to fight "if South Vietnam was not to fall."

After the announcement that American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin were attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in August 1964, the American buildup followed, with the number of ground troops climbing to 470,000 in 1967.

The general had gained approval for the buildup because American troops seemed to be winning most of their battles with the North Vietnamese and the Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam.

The idea was to use superior American force, supported by overwhelming air bombardment and artillery fire, not to seize or hold territory but to kill enemy soldiers in their jungle redoubts. American forces often went into these battles in helicopters, withdrawing the way they had come but leaving many to wonder why ground won with such difficulty could be surrendered with such ease.

Driven by requests from Mr. McNamara and the White House, "body counts" seemed to show that the strategy was working, that more Communist troops were being killed than Americans.

But American casualties rapidly mounted into the thousands, at a time when the military draft meant that not only volunteers but young men off the streets could be sent to risk their lives in the jungles.

As protests against deepening American involvement mounted, General Westmoreland warned that encouraging the enemy in this way could cost American lives.

Yet, he said in a speech in New York City in April 1967, "The end is not in sight," and he added, "In effect, we are fighting a war of attrition."

Then he flew to Washington to ask for still more reinforcements to bring United States forces up to 550,500, the "minimal essential force," or 670,000, the "optimum."

The request shocked Johnson, who asked, "Where does it all end?" Mr. McNamara asked how long it would take to win. As General Westmoreland recalled his answer, it was "With the optimum force, about three years; with the minimum force, at least five."

No decision had been made when the Communists launched an offensive during the Tet lunar new year festival on Jan. 31, 1968. They blasted into more than 100 cities and towns, occupied Hue for 25 days, and even fought their way into the grounds of the American Embassy in Saigon. Washington's optimism about progress shattered.

Clark M. Clifford, whom Johnson had put in charge of examining the troop requests and who later succeeded Mr. McNamara as secretary of defense, "had turned dove and defeatist," General Westmoreland later wrote, and the president had lost his stomach for the battle.

Johnson announced he would not run again for office in 1968, and told the general he was appointing him Army chief of staff. He should ignore press speculation that he had been "kicked upstairs," the president told him, but it was true.

The men met in the White House in the midst of riots that had started after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and afterward flew over the embattled capital while fires were still burning. "It looked considerably more distressing than Saigon during the Tet offensive," General Westmoreland observed.

President Richard M. Nixon pursued a different strategy after he took office in 1969.

"While Washington spared the bombs and the enemy talked but said nothing and agreed to nothing except the shape of the conference table, the war went on for four more years of American involvement," General Westmoreland later wrote. "That is hardly anything to claim credit for."

When General Westmoreland was promoted to Army chief of staff, he was succeeded in the Vietnam command by Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr., a fellow member of the West Point class of 1936.

General Abrams departed from General Westmoreland's way of operating. He emphasized measures to strengthen the South Vietnamese military's capability to do battle, and deployed American forces around cities and in other populous areas.

Back in Washington as the Army chief, General Westmoreland oversaw efforts to adjust the Army to the post-Vietnam period.

Gen. Bruce Palmer Jr., who served with General Westmoreland in Vietnam and Washington, wrote in his book, "The 25-Year War" (The University Press of Kentucky, 1984) that the Army benefited greatly from General Westmoreland's leadership in the Pentagon, but that the general "was deeply hurt by the slights accorded him" by Nixon administration officials, "who rarely consulted him on Vietnam affairs."

When General Westmoreland was not chosen as chairman of the Joint Chiefs in mid-1972, he retired and moved to Charleston.

He made a foray into South Carolina politics in 1974, running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, but was defeated in the primary by State Senator James B. Edwards, a conservative veteran of many years of Republican politics.

After the campaign, the general told supporters: "I was an inept candidate. I'm used to a structured organization, and this civilian process is so doggone nebulous."

An Inconclusive Libel Suit

In 1982, General Westmoreland filed a $120-million suit against CBS over a documentary, "The Uncounted Enemy," which he claimed accused him of misleading Johnson and the public about the war while he was in command in Vietnam.

The suit came to trial in 1984 in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Eighteen weeks of testimony ensued, in which some senior American officers who had served under General Westmoreland in Vietnam contended that he had been influenced by political rather than purely military concerns in reports about enemy strength that were sent to Washington.

When he dropped the suit early in 1985, he said he had come to believe that the trial, involving complex legal issues, was "a no-win situation" for him.

In a statement at the time, CBS declared that it did not believe "that General Westmoreland was unpatriotic or disloyal in performing his duties as he saw them."

The general said that he interpreted that statement as a victory and that it constituted an apology for what the program had charged. But CBS called that interpretation invalid and continued to contend that its documentary was accurate.

"As the soldier prays for peace, he must be prepared to cope with the hardships of war and to bear its scars," the general wrote in his autobiography. The quotation was a paraphrase from a speech by General MacArthur.

In a striking coincidence, it was also in 1982 that the Vietnam Memorial was dedicated on the Mall in Washington, one of the first events at which thousands of Vietnam veterans felt they could openly claim a salute from the American people.

Though the crowds were smaller than organizers had hoped, General Westmoreland, characteristically, was there.

This is an expanded version of the obituary published in some copies yesterday.

Related Video

An employee answers phone calls at the Google office in Zurich, August 18, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Christian Hartmann

By Alexei Oreskovic and Paul Thomasch

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK | Fri Jan 21, 2011 8:41pm EST

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - One day after Google's surprise announcement that Larry Page would once again run the company, investors and industry insiders were wondering if he is up to a now very different job.

The 38-year-old co-founder of the world's No. 1 Internet search company will replace Eric Schmidt as chief executive officer in April, at a time when Google Inc is facing tough competition from Facebook and Twitter.

It seems straight out of a well-worn Silicon Valley script -- but with which ending?

"Founder becoming CEO ... Is this like a Steve Jobs returning or a Jerry Yang returning?" Chris Dixon, a technology veteran who has invested in Skype and Foursquare, mused on Twitter, alluding to the two extremes of the tech industry storyline.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple Inc in the 1990s to save the company he founded from near insolvency. Since his return, Apple has set the agenda in technology and culture with the iPhone and iPad.

Yahoo Inc's Jerry Yang made a similar comeback, returning to his Internet company during a troubled stretch, but failed to restore its fortunes.

For Google, which dominates the search market and generated roughly $29 billion in revenue last year, the need for a change lacks the urgency that accompanied Jobs' return to Apple.

But analysts say the popularity of social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, as well as online coupon service Groupon, pose a growing threat to Google's business.

Google, whose stock underperformed the market in 2010, has struggled to develop its own social networking products and has seen many of its engineers and executives decamp to Facebook.

Meanwhile, new, smaller competitors in the Web search market are pecking away at its reputation. They say Google search result qualities, a hallmark of the search giant, has been deteriorate.

The attacks prompted Google, in a post on its official blog on Friday, to defend its record and promise to improve quality.

Page, who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin 13 years ago, will try to steer the company back to the forefront of Web innovation but must also run day-to-day operations of a 24,000-person organization -- a far cry from his last time at the helm.

"My fear would be you don't have a guy like Eric who keeps the trains running on time," said one former Google employee, who declined to be named for fear of reprisal.

"I'm having a hard time imagining (Larry) going from the role I've seen him in, to going to a CEO role," he added. "He can't come in and lay on the couch as he used to do and sort of interject here and there. Someone's got to lead the meetings."

Google hopes the management change will speed up decision-making. Page will take charge of the company's day-to-day operations, while Schmidt will focus on deals and government outreach, among other things, as executive chairman.

The track record for entrepreneurs becoming CEOs is not so good, said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, citing Michael Dell's return to the PC maker as another less-than-spectacular example of a founder jumping into the driver's seat.

"Managing an existing large business requires a different mindset and different set of skills, so a lot of entrepreneurs get quite bored and don't pay attention to details. And then things start slipping away," he said.

The key to Page's success as CEO, he said, will be to delegate a lot of the operational chores to a strong lieutenant while focusing on how to transform Google into a company that can adapt to the evolving Internet landscape.

"If Larry Page can do something different, get away from search, get away from email, try to explore some of these new platforms and bring in people to help him do that, then maybe Google can break this current reliance on Internet advertising and become a growth company again," said Cusumano.

Shares of Mountain View, California-based Google have risen 16 percent since Google reported third-quarter results in mid-October and are up almost 45 percent from their 52-week low of $433.63 touched in July 2010.

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch in New York, Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco and Sayantani Ghosh and Mary Meyase in Bangalore; editing by Joyjeet Das, Phil Berlowitz and Andre Grenon)

U.S. manufacturing, viewed as a lost cause by many Americans, has begun creating more jobs than it eliminates for the first time in more than a decade.

As the economy recovered and big companies began upgrading old factories or building new ones, the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. last year grew 1.2%, or 136,000, the first increase since 1997, government data show. That total will grow again this year, according to economists at IHS Global Insight and Moody's Analytics.

James Hagerty has encouraging news from the U.S. manufacturing sector, which is adding more jobs than it's losing for the first time in more than a decade.

Among others, major auto makers—both domestic and transplants—are hiring. Ford Motor Co. announced last week it planned to add 7,000 workers over the next two years.

The economists' projections for this year—calling for a gain of about 2.5%, or 330,000 manufacturing jobs—won't come close to making up for the nearly six million lost since 1997. But manufacturing should be at least a modest contributor to total U.S. employment in the next couple of years, these economists say.

After a steep slump during the recession, manufacturing is "the shining star of this recovery," says Thomas Runiewicz, an economist at IHS. He expects total U.S. manufacturing jobs this year to rise to about 12 million. Currently, manufacturing jobs account for about 9% of all U.S. nonfarm jobs; the average pay for those jobs is roughly $22 an hour, or nearly twice the average for service jobs, according to government data.

Despite the upbeat forecasts, job growth may remain modest because many companies are finding ways to increase production through greater efficiency and automation, without adding many workers. In the third quarter, U.S. manufacturing productivity increased as output rose 7.1% from a year earlier and hours worked grew just 3%. Conrad Winkler, a vice president at the consulting firm Booz & Co. who focuses on manufacturing, says manufacturers are being very cautious in their hiring, partly to avoid the risk of having to lay off people later on.

"Manufacturing is going to be a significant source of job growth over the next decade," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. He says U.S. manufacturers that survived the brutal 2008-09 recession are now very competitive, with much lower labor costs and debt burdens, and so can afford to expand. While they will keep building factories overseas to address demand in emerging markets, they also will invest in U.S. plants, Mr. Zandi says. He expects manufacturing job growth to average about 2% a year through 2015.

Factory Floor

The job growth is expected as companies replace aging equipment, take advantage of government incentives, seek energy savings and rediscover that it makes sense to produce some products, such as ovens and construction machinery, at home rather than shipping them long distances. A new tax break, approved by Congress in December, is expected to further stimulate investment by letting companies deduct from taxable income 100% of certain types of investments in 2011.

Whirlpool Corp., which has 39 factories world-wide, including nine in the U.S., had a tough decision to make last year. Parts of its oven and cooktop factory complex in Cleveland, Tenn., are more than 100 years old. The labyrinthine layout of the plant, built on a slope and cobbled together over the past century, requires a fleet of more than 100 forklifts to shuttle products along ramps connecting 13 different levels. Temperatures sometimes top 100 degrees inside the plant, which has no air conditioning. Alan Holaday, who heads North American manufacturing for Whirlpool, calls the plant "an industrial museum."

Melissa Hayes and Brandon Epperson assemble an oven at the Whirlpool plant in Cleveland, Tenn., Tuesday.

One obvious option was to move production of the cooking appliances to Mexico, where Whirlpool already has several factories and where its South Korean rivals make some of their cooking products. But, after months of study, Whirlpool decided in mid-2010 to spend $120 million on a new plant in Cleveland, a few miles from the old one, in what will be the company's first new U.S. factory since the mid-1990s. Whirlpool projects that its work force in Cleveland will grow to 1,630 within about two years from 1,500 now as production increases.

Although labor costs would be lower in Mexico, Whirlpool found lots of reasons to stay in the Cleveland area. It already had a trained work force there and wouldn't need to pay severance costs. Freight costs would be lower since most of the plant's products are sold in the U.S. Tennessee also looked safer than Mexico, which has been beset with drug-related violence. And state and local governments were willing to kick in about $30 million of incentives—including grants and property tax breaks—if Whirlpool stayed in the area. Most of the new jobs at the Whirlpool plant will be for assemblers, a spokeswoman said.

Caterpillar Inc. is building a $120 million plant to make excavator machines in Victoria, Texas. The plant will produce some machines that currently were being shipped from a Caterpillar plant in Japan to North American customers. That means the North American customers will get faster deliveries, and the Japan plant can devote more capacity to the booming Asian market. In return for creating 500 jobs in Texas, Caterpillar also got incentives from state and local authorities, including tax breaks and 320 acres of free land. Those jobs will include assemblers, engineers and logistics experts.

Dow Chemical Co. is building a 800,000-square-foot plant near its headquarters in Midland, Mich., to design and make batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles. In addition, Dow aims to expand a pilot project, also in Midland, in which it is making solar roof shingles that generate electricity. Such spending also creates jobs at suppliers. Dow cites estimates that every new job inside a chemical plant creates five jobs at suppliers and other related firms.

All of this doesn't herald a miracle recovery for manufacturing, which accounted for 11% of U.S. economic output in 2009, down from 27% in 1950. In a new book, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, argues that U.S. manufacturing faces continued decline unless the government comes up with a strategy to boost it, including bigger tax breaks and government support for R&D.

Another risk is that manufacturing jobs will start to vanish again if the U.S. economy can't sustain its current recovery and slips back into recession. Still, rising industrial production and capital investments are signs that manufacturing will remain a significant part of the U.S. economy at least in the near term.

2011年1月17日 星期一

别迷信财务报表

Don’t be fooled by illusory numbers

So often investors and entrepreneurs look at the wrong financial numbers and ratios when analysing companies. They focus obsessively on the latest year’s pre-tax profits, or perhaps post-tax earnings. But these can often be manipulated, or temporary. What matters much more are underlying sales, strong gross margins and free cash flow. Study these numbers over several years to see if a business really owns a solid franchise.

When an enterprise enjoys consistently solid sales as a percentage of capital employed, and high gross margins, then it should by rights make a decent bottom line and an attractive return on investment. And by high gross margins, I mean 60 per cent or more. Companies that enjoy this scale of margins – and keep their fixed costs within reasonable boundaries – should prosper.

Of course, companies with huge mark-ups over their raw costs are more vulnerable to being undercut by discounters. But it is always better to start with a lot of margin than a low gross margin. When I was involved with PizzaExpress and Strada, I learnt that the pizza business offers spectacular margins, better than anything else in the restaurant trade. Given the way menu prices have risen relentlessly, the major chains must enjoy gross margins of at least 80 per cent on their pizza, or a mark-up of 400 per cent over cost. Yet surprisingly, no one has come in to undercut them and offer a comparable product at half the price.

One of the more astonishing retail phenomena in Britain in recent years has been the sudden explosion of specialist shirt retailers. A large operator explained to me why: shirts wear out rather faster than say, suits; and shirts can achieve an 80 per cent gross margin – even if they are sold at only £30 or so.

By the same token, part of the reason electronics retailers are disappearing is that their gross margins are 20 per cent or even less. Even with big ticket unit prices, rents, property taxes, wages and other costs are killing the model. Similarly, most greetings card retailers have survived, despite the steady decline in their market, because their gross margins can be as high as 90 per cent. And part of the reason software companies have grown so rich, and software start-ups receive so much venture capital is their almost 100 per cent gross margins, if research and development are discounted.

Decades ago, shares were valued on a multiple of post-tax earnings – a P/E ratio. More recently, acquirers have adopted the private equity model using the ratio of enterprise value to earnings before interest depreciation and amortisation (EV/ebitda). This suited the inflationary environment for asset prices. Even now the two yardsticks are often conflated – sometimes accidentally, sometimes not.

But the fundamental problem with using ebitda as a gauge of profitability is that deprecation is typically a real cost. A business might be able to take a brief holiday, but eventually there will be a lot of catch-up spending to do. A plant has to be replaced, equipment upgraded, worn out buildings renewed. A better method is to judge sustainable post-tax profits after maintenance, capital expenditure and working capital adjustments. This net figure might be called free cash flow. They are the liquid funds available for interest, dividends or acquisitions.

A surprising proportion of companies never really shows a genuine free cash return – they are essentially a charity for their staff and customers. I used to feel that about the nightclub business: even though you could make juicy profits for a few years, there needed to be a complete reinvention every three years or so – new lighting, sound and so on – just to compete with newcomers. That investment typically represented three years’ profits. Effectively the whole undertaking just stood still. I fear the industry has become even tougher in recent times.

So my advice is to search out industries where you can capture at least a 60 per cent gross margin. And when examining a company’s accounts, focus on actual cash flow after cash costs, rather than illusory numbers such as earnings or ebitda.